Life After Life: Interviews with Twelve Murderers

"Tony Parker interviewed twelve people who had been convicted of murder. It seems very obvious now, but it was unusual at the time: he just let a tape recorder run and transcribed those interviews without him being in it, as if he were completely absent. What you get is the voice of the offenders speaking. He also did a fantastic book about convicted sex offenders called The Twisting Lane , which is again rather disturbing but very interesting. Life After Life is about murder. It was part of my education. I needed to hear what people themselves said about homicide. I needed to rid myself of this fantasy that everyone who killed was a kind of demented weirdo. Most people who kill pose no risk to anybody else at all, because the killing is very specific to the context of their relationship with the victim. Even those wretched men from the German battalion in Poland—they didn’t necessarily pose a danger to their wives, or the people in their villages when they went home, even after killing hundreds of other people. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . What I really like about Tony Parker’s work is that he centres the voice of his interviewees. You really get a sense of how the person who killed often found themselves looking back and thinking: How did that happen? How on earth did I let myself do that? People say things like, ‘I just lost it.’ What is the ‘it’ that you lose? I’ve met so many people over the years who have said ‘I lost it.’ It’s Tony Parker who inspired me to take a narrative approach when I work with people who have killed, to understand that I was meeting people in the middle of a story. People who have killed are like Dante ’s traveller; they find themselves in the middle of a dark wood because they have lost their way. I show up, or people like me, and we say, ‘what’s happening? Let’s walk together.’ Tony Parker’s material helped me to do that. I think so. It’s been my privilege to be able to share what I’ve learned about evil and violence over the course of a working lifetime. It is an invitation to come and look at that capacity for doing great cruelty and great harm that lies in all of us. The Devil You Know is a series of 12 encounters with a range of offenders: serial killers, arsonist, stalkers, and other people who are usually seen as ‘monsters’. We’ve had some nice feedback and it’s now out in paperback so I hope more folk can access it. So for me, what comes out of Ordinary Men , and it comes out of Tony Parker’s book as well, is that so many of the people who kill say, ‘I’m not a bad guy, I just did this terrible thing. Now I can’t go back to the way I was before, when I was a regular guy, an ordinarily good person.’ People who have killed are not in some alien world of their own. They are people like us, who find themselves in situations that make killing possible."